Thinking in complete sentences
2 weeks ago, I started working through Sam Harris' introductory course to meditation, after reading about Manu Moreale going through it as part of his experimental June.
I didn't do it through the app because fuck apps; the content is dubiously legally available on Internet Archive. I'm 17 days in so far, and it's been... something.
I want to work on mindfulness. I'm really bad about dissociating often, and not taking the step back needed to identify when I'm doing it. I've also written several times now about struggling to identify what I want; I'm hoping mindfulness will help me to better identify those feelings and connect to them. I'm not sure that's happened.
Waking Up puts a big focus on a kind of external observation of consciousness. The instructor regularly pushes the idea of sensations arising in the same place as our thoughts; the feeling of the body in chair is felt in the same place as the noises of our environment appear, and this is the same place thoughts appear. It's a tough thing for me to conceptualize. I feel, at moments, like I might maybe have divorced the sensation of my hands from the shape of them, so that they simply hang in my mind, but it feels like I'm doing it wrong. And I'm not sure it's the type of thing I want to focus on, anyways.
Sometimes I just let the instructor's voice pass over me while I identify the thoughts arising. I can struggle to focus while doing this, though. One thing I've found interesting in this is that when I try to be mindful, I end up thinking in complete sentences to label the thoughts I'm having. As in:
I'm thinking about the weird feeling in my stomach. I'm imagining explaining meditation to my new roommate next month. I'm imagining talking to Brigitte.
But usually, I understand the concept of the thought before I've even finished "I'm imagining..." yet I still feel compelled to complete the sentence to maintain focus. It almost feels like I'm failing to be mindful if I don't fully commit to verbalizing the complete structure of the thought.
I think what I'll do next is see if I can acknowledge a thought without voicing a full sentence describing it. It would be an interesting change; my internal thoughts are often a streaming monologue of words in a voice. How would it feel to reduce it to a wordless concept that I nevertheless understand?